which Oxford recognized by the degree of D.C.L. (1916).
Learning, however, was only Strachan-Davidson's recreation. Though essentially a scholar he gave his best energies to the service of his university—whose interests in connexion with the Indian civil service he defended strenuously and successfully on more than one occasion, but especially in the years 1903–1904 and in 1913—and of his college, which he loved with a monastic patriotism most appropriate in one of the last representatives of the race of celibate life-fellows. This patriotism was humanized, but in no sense weakened, by his strong personal friendships and by his tolerance for those who could not permanently embrace his rule of life.
In 1893, on Jowett's death, there were many who expected that Strachan-Davidson would succeed him. But the electors preferred Edward Caird, a great philosophical teacher, and Strachan-Davidson loyally placed himself at the service of the new master, who was also an old friend. Their alliance was fortunate for the college, and in 1907, when Caird resigned, Strachan-Davidson was unanimously elected in his place—but at the age of sixty-three, with his naturally weak health impaired by a recent accident and operation. His tenure of office was quiet, prosperous, and uneventful until the outbreak of the European War in 1914. He faced the crisis in college affairs with a wise and cautious statesmanship. With the help of only three fellows he kept the teaching organization in being; and he did his utmost to make the college useful for the chief purpose that it then served, the training of officer-cadets. He gave his juniors a high example of courage, patience, and unobtrusive well-doing. On 28 March 1916 he died suddenly, at the Master's Lodgings, of cerebral haemorrhage. He is buried in the cemetery of Holywell church, Oxford. A speaking portrait, painted in 1909–1910 by Sir George Reid, hangs in the hall of Balliol College.
[J. W. Mackail, James Leigh Strachan-Davidson, 1925; personal knowledge.]
STRANG, WILLIAM (1859–1921), painter and etcher, was born at Dumbarton 13 February 1859, the younger of the two sons of Peter Strang, builder, of Dumbarton, by his wife, Janet Denny. He was at school at Dumbarton Academy, but before he was seventeen he went up to London (1875) and entered the Slade School of Art. London was to be his home for the rest of his life. In 1875 Alphonse Legros [q.v.] became Slade professor of fine art at University College, London; his influence on Strang's art was deep and lasting. Under Legros, Strang took to etching, while not neglecting the painter's brush. It was as an etcher of imaginative compositions, in which homeliness and realism, sometimes with a grim or fantastic element, were subdued to fine design and severe drawing, that he first made a name. The illustrations to Death and the Ploughman's Wife (1888) and The Earth Fiend (1892), two ballads written by himself, and those to The Pilgrim's Progress (1885) contain some of the best of his earlier etchings. Among the numerous single plates the portraits are especially good, though these were to be surpassed as the artist acquired more confident mastery and a broader style, tending to exchange the use of acid for dry point or graver. The best of the later portraits are masterpieces of their kind. Among later sets of etchings are the illustrations to The Ancient Mariner (1896), Kipling's Short Stories (1900), and Don Quixote (1902). A catalogue of Strang's etched work, published in 1906, with supplements (1912 and 1923), contains small reproductions of all his plates, 747 altogether. During the latter part of his life he etched less and painted more. Much of his time was given also to portrait drawings, in style founded on the Holbein drawings at Windsor. Strang did a great number of these, including many of the most distinguished people of his time. He designed and cut one of the largest woodcuts ever made, ‘The Plough’. As a painter he experimented in many styles, but at his best was quite original. ‘Bank Holiday’ in the Tate Gallery, and the ‘Portrait of a Lady’ at Glasgow, are good examples of his clean, bright colour and rigorous drawing. The Tate Gallery also contains two self portraits and a landscape. The British Museum has 136 of the etchings.
Strang was elected A.R.A. in 1906, R.A. (as an engraver) in 1921, and president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in 1918. He was of middle height, strongly built. Direct in speech and combative in argument, he delighted in good company, talk, and fun. He often travelled on the Continent, and visited the United States. He made many portraits of himself, etched, drawn, and painted, including one in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. He married in 1885 Agnes M'Symon.
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